Saturday, February 27, 2010

In LA, there are tons of different communities at the intersection of tech, art, green/sustainability, unique lifestyle design, digital/collaborative media, and social action that don't know each other but should. Think of Ignite as a set of trailers for exciting projects people are doing that you should know about.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The premier Open Source conference in the U.S., now in its 8th year, has content for everyone! If you're looking to learn, choose talks from a developer's track, a beginner track, or one of the three general interest tracks.

Please set a good example by taking your vacations. Leave the laptop at home and really unwind. Encourage your employees to take theirs. The short term cost of the week or two lost in a couple of project schedules is going to be made up in improved worker productivity, quality, and engagement on return. If you can't accomodate that amount of slowdown, you probably have other problems too.

I'll let you know next week when I'm back from Hawaii. This is my third visit to the Kaimana Klassik ultimate tourney. I've had a total blast, though I have yet to find time to sneak in a day or two of work like I'd hoped. 10 days is a long,luxurious, wonderful trip -- and drains my vacation account down to roughly 0 hours.

No perl posts for you this week! I did do some fun re-factoring while flying over.

Friday, February 12, 2010

BIL 2010 Starts tomorrow, Friday Feb 12th in Long Beach. I'd go if I wasn't on vacation in Hawai'i. Props to Tilly for telling me about this conference at last month's Mindshare la, I hope you're going and taking notes.

BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It's a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action.
We invite you to bring your world into ours.

John Smart -- Evo Devo Universe

Understanding the universe in an evolutionary and developmental way

Kiem Tjong --
Democratizing the University Innovation Process

Why is it so difficult to commercialize university technologies, and how can we better harvest the work of our brightest minds.

Open Architecture Network, winner of the TED Prize and the world’s first open source site for architectural solutions to humanitarian crises.

Brad Templeton
-- The Evils of Cloud Computing

There is a darkness to this cloud computing movement: we are giving other companies all our personal data to store and handle.

David Hale
-- Pillbox – Identify Unknown Drugs

This tool allows users to visually search for and identify unknown pills using appearance information and high resolution images.

Alexandros Pagidas
-- University of the Future

Current education does not create free, creative and wise individuals, but workers for the requirements of the market. Most universities give you an education that will supply you with a career – not a good life.

Jayson Elliot
-- Rethinking the Modern GUI

Why are we stuck with the same user interface computers had 30 years ago? Jayson explores the future of the Graphical User Interface.

John Schloendorn
-- A Garage-Level Biomedical Research Effort is Taking on Death

Using out-of-the-box thinking and a shoestring budget to attempt to cure human aging.

Chia Hwu
-- Communities in Healthcare

Healthcare is about people. How can communities be used to improve it?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

We had a great meeting this month! Thank you guests and presenters.
Twenty mongers in attendance at the start with a few more filing in later.
I thought I had over ordered by getting 5 large and one XL pizza, but they disappeared within 20 minutes.

Looking forward to seeing you all again on Wed February 24, 2010.

My talk on Hadoop::Streaming had to cover too much breadth of background to spend much time getting into the code. I look forward to doing a part two where I display a non-trivial example. The talk and slides covered an overview of Hadoop, Hadoop streaming, writing streaming jobs manually, writing streaming jobs using Hadoop::Streaming from CPAN, testing jobs locally, and finally running jobs on the cluster.

The slides will be posted soon. There was a hardware failure on the *.pm.org hosting box on Tuesday into Wednesday, so I didn't push an update. You can see them in raw vroom format in the Git Repo.

Aran was kind enough to come down from Thousand Oaks and present a nice talk on "Coding Concisely in Perl." This was a fun, interactive presentation discussing various ways to make your code (or your inherited code) cleaner and more representative of its core ideas. From simple changes like using ternaries for setting variables, using map/grep to replace cut-and-paste code, and finally a look at the ValueClick method of mocking the production DB. Their DB Mock layer uses a shim to create a local sqlite3 db by autoloading the schemas from the production databases. It's quite clever.

The slides on DB testing have company code on them, so we are waiting on his CTO to approve releasing them for publishing. I expecte to have them up on la.pm.org soon.